The Thinking Reed

The periodical Voprosy zhizni [Problems of Life], which was published by the idealists in 1905, ‘belonged to the left, the radical school of thought, but it was the first in the history of Russian periodicals to combine that sort of social and political ideas with religious inquiry, with a metaphysical outlook and a new tendency in literature.’92 However, this periodical survived for one year only — amid the turmoil of the first Russian Revolution — and then ceased to appear. ‘In the heat of battle,’ its writers, as Berdyaev himself admitted, ‘often attached insufficient value to that social truth and right which was to be found in the left intelligentsia and which retained its power.’93 This impelled them further and further away from the democratic and socialist line that they had originally proclaimed. In itself the appearance of the Russian idealists was, as I have already said, a logical reaction to positivism and the positivistically treated vulgar Marxism of European Social Democracy. The trouble was that, lacking support from the mass of the intelligentsia, the idealists moved more and more to the right: ‘these cultural and idealist tendencies began to lose their connection with the social revolutionary movement; more and more they lost the broad social standpoint.’94 Later, Berdyaev was to say that this departure from the revolution was ‘fatal’. And it was just this shift to the right, intensified by disappointment with the failure of the 1905 movement, that gave rise to the Vekhi symposium, with its openly reactionary programme. Berdyaev subsequently complained that Vekhi had been misunderstood — that it was not, on the whole, a political act but a ‘struggle for the spirit’ and only through misunderstanding, ‘in accordance with the ancient tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, the struggle for the spirit was taken as reactionary, almost like a betrayal of the struggle for freedom.’95

Nevertheless this interpretation of Vekhi, after the event (in a period when Berdyaev had again become a left-winger, a personalist96 and a Christian socialist) raises doubts. Above all, the tone adopted by all the contributors to Vekhi was extremely aggressive and uncompromising. There were no sins with which they did not charge the intelligentsia. While condemning them, they simultaneously tried to preach to them. ‘There is no word more unpopular in the intelligentsia milieu than the word “humility”,’ complained S. Bulgakov.97 ‘A swarm of sick men isolated in their native land — this is the Russian intelligentsia,’ declared M. Gershenzon.98 ‘The intelligentsia’s consciousness demands radical reform,’ concluded Berdyaev.99 The same idea is developed by Struve, too, when he affirms that ‘it is mandatory that the intelligentsia reexamine its entire world-view, and this includes subjecting its chief buttress to radical re-examination — the socialist repudiation of personal responsibility.. ’100

Not surprisingly, such attacks produced an outburst of indignation within the Russian intelligentsia. Until then such voices had been heard only from the governmental camp and the appearance of Vekhi was regarded as an act of betrayal, as ‘a stab in the back by persons who had always stood in their [the intelligentsia’s] own ranks’.101 The bulk of the intelligentsia repudiated the ‘revisionism’ of Vekhi ‘Opposition to the views of Vekhi’, wrote Leonard Schapiro, ‘was strong not only among the avowed radicals such as the Social-Revolutionaries, the heirs of the nineteenth-century Populists, but even more so among the Kadets, a party with an avowedly liberal programme.’102 The collection of essays by Struve and his friends was reprinted several times, and everyone read it, but only as a ‘scandalous’ book.103

Nevertheless, Vekhi gave rise to a serious polemic. The Social-Revolutionaries and the Cadets even published two symposia in reply.104 Lenin wrote a special article ‘Concerning Vekhi’. It must be said that he used the appearance of Vekhi to compromise the Cadet Party, to which its authors belonged. Consequently, he did not so much argue against the ideas expressed in the symposium as denounce the Cadet Party, calling it ‘the party of Vekhi’ with a criminal connection with the authors of that book, which the Cadets themselves disowned in every possible way.105 Lenin had a poor understanding of the essence of the dispute and did not even discuss it, declaring that ‘it is not the intelligentsia that Vekhi is attacking. This is only an artificial and misleading manner of expression.’106 In his own way he was even glad about the publication of Vekhi, for Berdyaev, Bulgakov and Struve unknowingly helped him considerably in his fight against Russian liberalism by discrediting their own party: ‘working-class democrats should welcome Vekhi.’107